So You Want a Flatscreen on the Wall? Part 1

10:17 AM
Katy
4 Comments

This is how my living room started out when we moved in and I crammed everything from the last house into this one:

I tacked the cable for the old box TV around the perimeter of the room. I used a white cable (since the baseboards are white), and just tacked it in place. Nice.

We lived like this for the last 18 months, but now the time has come. The TV is so old that we have to jump up and down on the floor or bang on it to get the picture to stop "fuzzing". I gave this cabinet and TV to my next door neighbor (she has a bigger house and loved the armoire -- it really is pretty).
I decided to put a flatscreen TV centered on the wall ...

First of all, I needed to move the TV jack. There is a crawlspace under my house, where I can access all the electrical and cables run for this room. (My first floor is basically one room -- if you turn around in front of the couch you'll be staring at my kitchen. Itty Bitty)

Come under the house with me and my daughter as we try to run the coaxial TV cable from one wall to the other....

This is the wall with current TV jack. I can't see the cable anywhere because it was run underground outside the house...so I find the location of the electrical outlet on that wall...
And drill a hole up through the floor as close to the wall as possible

(After I removed the insulation that was stuff between the joists.)

Now I've got my fishtape and I'm trying to cram my new cable up through the hole. It has to connect to the current jack with a splitter.

Then we string the cable under the house and over to the new wall, where we do the same thing: drill a hole, cram the cable up there. Here's my daughter helping me (fuzzy pic!) and we're stapling it in a couple of places so it doesn't hang down.

And then we cut a hole in the living room wall and fish the cable out...

(I tore off the baseboards because I'm covering this wall with wood planks. Free wood pallets that I tore apart...that will be a post coming soon)

Now at this point I still need to run the conduit under the house for more electrical outlets, since this TV needs both an outlet and a coaxial cable. You could also run HDMI cable for other snazzy features...but I've only got so much energy here and let's be real -- the only reason I bought this TV was because I wanted the space freed up in the living room. I don't watch TV. I don't even have the cable turned on! My kids just watch their giant collection of kiddie DVDs.
(Jump to next post in this series: So You Want a Flatscreen on the Wall, Part 2)

After buying the cheapest 32" TV I could find at Walmart, I realized that it cost more than I wanted to spend on my entire living room remodel! ($375 with a wall mount kit!!) But I bit the bullet. It is kinda neat...

Mom and Her Drill

I used to be a mechanical engineer and a single mom. I built a tiny beach house on Tybee Island for kicks (which I sold in 2015). Then I married Prince Charming and we're renovating his gigantic wreck of a fixer-upper (aka The Lake Mansion). It's like the Brady Bunch meets The Money Pit. (Nobody younger than 40 will even get that. Sigh.)